Best New Music of 2017
Last year, I told you about the best new music of 2016. Well, now it’s 2017. So…
- Rancid — Troublemaker
It’s worth noting that this is not only the best new album of 2017, but also one of Rancid’s best albums ever, and “Blues Again” is one of their best songs. This is at least the best Rancid album since 2000’s self-titled album, although it’s hard to compare it to that album, specifically, because the styles are so different.
Rancid’s natural genre, as defined on their original self-titled album and “Let’s Go” is street punk, and every album after that has added a small tweak to the street punk genre. For instance, “…And Out Come the Wolves” tweaked with ska, “Life Won’t Wait” tweaked with reggae, “Self Titled 2” added hardcore, “Indestructible” tweaked with pop, “Let the Dominoes Fall” did so with folk, “Honor is All We Know” added Oi punk to the mix, and the latest album, “Troublemaker” is essentially a street punk blues album.
So, while it’s easy to say 2000’s self-titled album is objectively better than, say, 2014’s “Honor is All We Know,” since the sub-genres are similar enough, it’s hard, and probably not fair, to compare “S/T 2” to “Troublemaker.”
2. Svetlanas — This is Moscow, Not LA
To begin with, I saw the Svetlanas in the fall of 2016 in South Philadelphia and it was easily the best show I’d seen in years, despite being the worst attended (Connie’s Ric Rac, where the show was held, did not promote the show or sell pre-sale tickets!).
Anyway, the basic story about the Svetlanas is that they’re a punk rock band from Russia who’ve been banned from the country. Unlike Pussy Riot, they chose to flee when the government cracked down on punk rock, and, also unlike Pussy Riot, they play pure punk rock and hardcore music; their politics are more an extension of what they are as artists, rather than the other way around. And that’s not a shot at Pussy Riot, who are great in their own right, but it’d be hard to call them pure punk rock, as far as genre music goes.
Anyway! They put on — easily — the best show of the night, and one of the coolest shows I’ve ever seen. Singer Olga not only created the mosh pit before she began singing, but stayed in it the entire time.
As far as “This is Moscow Not LA” goes, I’ve legitimately frightened at least two Lyft drivers when they ask me what kind of music I wanted to listen to (apparently, they have to ask you this? And then put on your music?) and I’ve asked to have this album put on. Key track: “Let’s Get Drunk.”
3. Menzingers — After The Party
I’m a total sucker for the Menzingers! I don’t even know why. But in the case of their 2017 album “After The Party,” the lyrics and general feel of the album is sort of where I’m at as a person. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, everything is terrible/ Buying marijuana makes you feel like a criminal/ When your new friends take a joke too literal/ Making you feel like the bad guy/ Oh, where are we gonna go, oh now that our twenties are over?”
I missed Punk Rock Bowling in New Jersey earlier this year and I’m not even broken up about it because I had a little baby at home, and leaving that for a weekend of punk rock debauchery didn’t feel like a thing that made sense to do, nor did I want to do it. It’s hard to imagine wanting to go to a long weekend music festival at this point in my life, because honestly, who cares.
Still, the Menzingers’ shoe-gazey punk rock makes me feel good. And I think that’s why they’ve sort of, kind of, crossed over to the mainstream. I think?
Anyway, the Menzingers are perhaps the easiest band within the much more broad “punk rock” genre to listen to these days. If I’d asked my Lyft drivers to put on the Menzingers instead of the Svetlanas, I’d have spent fewer awkward minutes in the back seat of strangers’ cars.
4. Transplants — Take Cover
This is easily the worst Transplants album, if you want to call it that, but it’s still better than most everything else I can think of that came out in 2017. “Take Cover” is, perhaps not surprisingly, a bunch of covers. And by “bunch,” I mean six. But really five, because one of the covers is a cover of a song the Transplants performed on Travis Barker’s solo album, “Give the Drummer Some.” There’s also an original at the end of the album, which is one of the Transplants best songs.
For those who don’t know, the Transplants are drummer Travis Barker (of Blink 182, and other stuff), singer/guitarist Tim Armstrong (of Rancid), and Skinhead Rob, a hardcore singer/rapper.
The Transplants early albums really stretched what it meant to be a punk rock band. And not in the way pop-punk of the early 2000s did. More in the “is this guy screaming or rapping?” way. The Transplants latched onto the rap/rock trend of the early 2000s and created something super cool and maybe even more poppy than some of the legitimate pop bands in that genre, like Limp Bizkit and whoever else.
You’ve probably heard the Transplants even if you don’t know it. One of their songs was featured in a shampoo commercial!
After two genre-defying (and defining) albums in the early/mid-2000s, the Transplants took a break and didn’t come back until a few years ago, when they released “In a Warzone” which basically got rid of the hip-hop style and was more of a hardcore album with obvious (but good) leftovers from Rancid’s “Honor is All We Know” 2014 album. As it happens, that Transplants album brought in so-called “Leftover music” from all members’ other projects.
The problem, as I saw it, was that the songs all sounded like they were performed by the Transplants on “In a Warzone,” but there was no explicit reason why they should have been. May of the Tim Armstrong songs could have been just as good if performed by Rancid, etc.
I still love that album. And I really like “Take Cover,” too, even if it’s the laziest thing the Transplants have ever released.
It’s not clear if the Transplants are performing these covers (which include stuff from the Beastie Boys, Minor Threat, Madness, and others) in order to pay homage to the rap/rock genre and/or their general influences, or just because it’d be fun for these three guys to perform those songs.
Either way, though: It doesn’t matter. It’s hard to say no to anything coming from a band affiliated with Tim Armstrong these days, because that guy is a god damn musical genius, and “Take Cover” is on my regular rotation.
5. Partner — In Search of Lost Time
I found out about Partner because, of all things, Tegan and Sara tweeted about them! I clicked, listened, and liked. Partner sound the way Tegan and Sara would still sound if their music had stuck to where it was in 2007.
I don’t mind where Tegan and Sara has gone with their more poppy later albums, but one of the reasons, I think, they broke out so hard in the mid-aughts was the way they were able to bring in all these different genres together in a way that broke out from the so-called “indie rock” movement — a movement which, by the way, destroyed mainstream rock music forever.
Anyway, Tegan and Sara: Still good! But it wasn’t until I began listening to Partner that I found something to replace the rocky-punky-poppy sound they left behind with 2012’s “Heartthrob.”
Partner is that! Their music is awesome. They also happen to be two women from Canada. So, maybe there are more of these bands out there, somewhere, in Canada.
3–6?. Bad Cop Bad Cop — Warriors
Forgive me, but I didn’t hear about Bad Cop, Bad Cop until 2018, so they weren’t included on this list initially. And I’m not sure how I failed to hear about them! First of all, they’re a fast pop-punk band on Fat Wreck Chords whose music is right up my alley; second, their lead singer, Stacey Dee, was heavily featured on the studio version of “Home Street Home,” the Fat Mike-co-penned stage show, the album of which I own; and, third, they played a show I went to in 2016! (I missed them, though.)
Anyway! They rock. It’s hard for me to say whether their album is the third best, fourth, or sixth of the year, in my opinion, because it’s still pretty fresh in mind, even if it’s not that physically fresh to the rest of the world, per se.
But it’s fantastic, and the issues Dee hits on are pretty amazing, too. “On social media what’s really going on/Opinions without action never gets anything done/And I’ll be gratified by trying to play my part/Revolutionary martyrdom won’t tear us apart/You can change my name to Joan of Arc/It’s my right to choose/Not racists or nationalists/Not this fascist president/It’s their fight to lose/I’m a masochistic activist/A modern abolitionist/Who wants to make the whole world humanist.”
:::Thumbs up emoji:::
Best Tours
- Choking Victim
- Rancid/Dropkick Murphys
- Wolf Parade
Were there other tours this year? I feel like I missed a lot of shows. And a lot of albums.
